NTS ABSTRACT

Sept 7

David Zureick-Brown

Progress on Mazur’s program B

I’ll discuss recent progress on Mazur’s ”Program B”, including my own recent work with Jeremy Rouse which completely classifies the possibilities for the 2-adic image of Galois associated to an elliptic curve over the rationals. I will also discuss a large number of other very recent results by many authors.

Sept 21

Chao Li

Goldfeld's conjecture and congruences between Heegner points

Given an elliptic curve E over Q, a celebrated conjecture of Goldfeld asserts that a positive proportion of its quadratic twists should have analytic rank 0 (resp. 1). We show this conjecture holds whenever E has a rational 3-isogeny. We also prove the analogous result for the sextic twists of j-invariant 0 curves. For a more general elliptic curve E, we show that the number of quadratic twists of E up to twisting discriminant X of analytic rank 0 (resp. 1) is >> X/log^{5/6}X, improving the current best general bound towards Goldfeld's conjecture due to Ono--Skinner (resp. Perelli--Pomykala). We prove these results by establishing a congruence formula between p-adic logarithms of Heegner points based on Coleman's integration. This is joint work with Daniel Kriz.